The confrontation between Machu and Nyaan ended up being kind of a nothinburger, and Machu easily succeeded in awakening Lalah. So what did that do? As we discovered later in the episode, something. Maybe the third impact again. We can never have enough of those, I suppose.
Enter Char.
The final confrontation with Kycilia happening on a theatre stage was a forceful, but still pretty good visual symbolism. As they have their talk, the play is crashed by the MCs of the show, who take the wheel in the usual search of Mr. Walking Plot Device, who sheepdogged them back into Lalah's presence. Kycilia gets unceremoniously dispatched as not relevant anymore to the plot, and both Chekov's guns go off, not at who'd you'd expect.
Char getting subconsciously magically dressed into his uniform by Lalah was utterly hilarious and blatantly a "hey guys its me, the guy from the merch" moment.
And while the battle outside rages on, we discover - Mr. Walking Plot Device is... from the UC, and might be, if I interpreted the scene correctly, Amuro Ray - here to destroy the G-Spam timeline.
Queue the late 80s Album Oriented Rock / Synthpop blend, it's Beyond the Time time, and time to bring back the RX-78-2 to the fight for the cool of it. Gonna buy the merch yet?
My cynical commentary aside
Any thoughts on the episode? I liked most of it, beyond the quick dressup scene I mocked and the finale. Lalah as a world ending threat (or is she? that's actually a question that remains unanswered and is interpreted differently by characters!) was probably an inevitable plot development, in a society that knows only the apocalypse and status quo (I'm talking to you liberals), and Char vs Machu vs Nyaan could have been a decent final battle for it.
However, the ending was just awful imo. If that is Amuro in the graffiti man's soul, or inside that Gundam, then any conflicts from the G-Spam universe become completely meaningless.
It all becomes background noise to Amuro vs Char, because Tomino wrote so in 1979 and 1988.
Nuuuuuu you can't just steal my thread from me nuuuuuu
(I'm kidding post away. I've been waiting 24 hrs to make the threads after the show each week since that seemed about when people had watched the ep, but we're getting to the end and if people want to react immediately that's fine too. Also, like it could be WW3 soon so...)
It's a recreation of a scene in the last episode of Zeta Gundam, with the exact same setup of people debating ideology while pointing guns at each other. Just that it's Kycilia instead of Haman this time, I guess.
What's kinda weird/interesting here is that Kycilia is spouting off rhetoric that's almost word-for-word Char's Counterattack Char, to Char, and Char's having none of it. The scene only works as Gundam interrogating itself as meta-text, because it's about the futility of fascist death-cults misinterpreting historical materialism and the dramatic irony of the same people making the same mistakes over and over and over again no matter how many times they get a do over... and then the punchline is this Loony Tunes ass FLCL moment
because as much as the old smothers the new, the new has the energy to bring something new to the table.
Ginga Bishonen Char Aznable
Char saying what y'all have been thinking for the past 6 episodes
Last ep isn't going to (just) be Amuro in Gramps vs. Char's Red Gundam, it's going to be Machu fighting for the right for her timeline to exist, because the point of multiverse stories is that no matter how bad things get, a better world is always possible. After all,
: "In the dark times, should the stars also go out?"
and also as tribute/send-off to U.C., and a creative statement that the new doesn't have to be beholden to the old.
Also as the target audience Beyond the Time is the sickest beat drop ever to give a character who came from "the other side" so I forgive all GQuuuuuuX's many failings and will be buying the merchandise.
(For real I'll leave my real criticisms till next week, provided we're not nuclear dust)
Edit: The title for next episode is a quote from Tomino's autobiography: "That's why I am... on the path to Gundam."
I laughed out loud when the shot of the theatre seats came up. A title card of "Hey folks, do you remember Zeta Gundam" would have been less subtle. No Scirocco equivalent here, though!
This Char also hasn't been through the events of Zeta and ZZ (AEUG eventually being co-opted into the Federation) to get to the point where he decides the only path forward is yeeting a rock at Earth.
I mean, he almost dropped a rock on Granada and it was literally postmodern author-as-God fiat that stopped that from happening
And then his solution to being trapped in this timeline for being too beloved by the author/audience stand-in Lalah is to "disappear" (the) God (of this world), so he's not ideologically out of the anti-hero woods yet, but yeah this Char is closer to Quattro Bajeena given what he says to Kycilia about Newtypes. Which is really interesting, since Zeta's probably the one time we see the character at his best, fumbling attempts at mentorship and revolution and all.
Hey, some people are just predisposed towards wanting to giving up, saying "fuck it", and throwing the biggest rock they can find at the imperial hegemon.
Glances at my MAL yeah, I guess I have done a 時が見える
I mean, this is the same idiot whose best plan for assassinating space hitler involved joining the space Wehrmacht, so him taking “unlimited genocide on the first world” to it’s logical extreme should’ve been very unsurprising in retrospect
All the prequel stuff Yasuhiko added in the Origin makes his plan seem incredibly silly, too.
Kinda why I consider Origin non-canon, because Casval makes more sense as a poor kid in over his head just opportunistically going with the flow because he's out of options, rather than some Machiavellian schemer playing 4D chess.